The Rural Juror
I’m officially off today – until Wednesday in fact – for reasons other than “too busy/sick to work”, for the first time in a goodly while. I have skipped work a lot of days this summer, but didn’t actually get to take any off; I ditched lots of meetings but didn’t actually reduce my workload very much. I’m not dedicated to the job, but one of the ways I’ve arranged to have a very flexible schedule is to be “available” and to produce visible tokens of work even on days when I can’t work, so that my absence is less visible. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t been able to write this summer – there were not a lot of days when I got through the demands of my actual life and enough day job and still had energy for writing.
Even today was not without struggle. Dog seems to have another UTI 1not super surprising while he’s doing chemo, which makes him dribble urine pretty regularly, and which we needed to get treated before we left. They wouldn’t give us any drugs right away so Dog is just dealing with it for now. Hopefully it doesn’t take too long for them to complete their culture or whatever we’re waiting for. I feel like we could have started the default drugs and changed them if the culture suggested we need something different. That’s what we’d do for humans. But since we were leaving town we had to settle for what was available on short notice.
Shanda is still at high levels of stress. Your physical pain and lots of anger make many things harder than usual, and have kept us apart. You weren’t quite ready today to give it up, but we made some progress tonight. We at least got to talk for a minute. And with luck tomorrow will be one step better.
So now we’re almost at the 49th parallel, in the middle of nowhere, staying someplace Dog can use the water. We didn’t get here until after dark 2It’s now past the equinox so we’re back to short days and into the rainy season. The darkness felt pretty early today as I drove into it., given the late start for a vet appointment, but tomorrow I hope to find a place for Dog to romp in the water, and maybe even a small boat.
There are lots of parts of life that are different in the city, but one I forget is the difference in architecture. There are lots of reasons for that – one is that land is much cheaper outside the city and it makes people think about buildings differently. Bigger and less carefully structured, only 1 floor, finished to be low-maintenance materials, attached 6 car garage (in addition to the pole barn). It’s not exactly bad, but it’s also not for me. It doesn’t smell quite like my shitty childhood, but it does smell like all the times I visited as an adult, and that’s still not great.
I wish with all this space there was a bigger bed. I cannot sleep – cannot even relax – when anyone is touching me. We’ve had a king for years now, and recently upgraded to a whole section of the bedroom floor being fancy foam. Tonight (and for a couple more) I’ll be much closer to Shanda than usual. Nothing against you, but it’s hard for me to take being 2 feet closer all night. Touch is so disruptive for me and the toucher being unconscious makes me feel even more trapped. I don’t know how you guys put up with it, let alone how it makes you feel good, or how you can sleep when it’s happening. I’d rather sleep in the car or on the floor than have to touch someone all night.
Let’s give sleep a shot though. I want to be able to use some of this vacation and that will be eaiser if I sleep sooner than I have been. If things go as I hope there will be time for the rest of the writes tomorrow.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
